The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) define requirements for designers and developers to improve accessibility for people with disabilities. It defines three levels of conformance: Level A, Level AA, and Level AAA.
This page contains information about this website’s accessibility goals. If you’d like to learn more about accessibility, I recommend the W3C’s Accessibility Fundamentals Overview as a starting point.
Accessibility Goals
I strongly believe that creating with accessibility in mind helps to make the world better for everyone.
In every step of my website I aim to align with the guidelines, including:
- progress toward alignment to the WCAG 2.1 AAA standard
- use of a readable font (Atkinson Hyperlegible)
- breadcrumb trail is included to navigate back home, as though you are Hansel and Gretel in the woods but nobody has eaten the beadcrumbs
- site map is included
- avoiding fully-aligned and center-aligned text
- avoiding chunks of italic text
- distracting gifs are on select pages with a warning
- responsive design across all devices
- colour contrast to a WCAG 2.1 AAA rating
- no autoplaying video or audio, and in fact no background audio at all
- links and headings make sense out of context, and avoid terms such as ‘click here’
- colour and direction is not the only way of conveying information, such as avoiding ’the red box’ or ‘see below’ as a way to describe a subject
- alt text for all images, even describing decorational images as art is important content itself
- logical flow aligning to correct HTML structure including descriptive headings in an organised hierachy
- definitions for any abbreviations used
- language tags used where languages other than Australian English have been utilised
- tables use a summary and are used for data not layout
- for website navigation, text is not ‘baked in’ to raster images. This allows for translation, increase of text size, and use of screen readers to allow users to navigate the website with greater ease.
Technologies Used
I aim to build this website from a strong foundation, and so it has been built primarily with HTML and CSS.
While I attempt to limit use of JavaScript on this website, some has been used for features such as the style switcher on the Settings page.
No ARIA is better than bad ARIA, and so I have also kept it to a minimum and instead utilising a better core structure.
Please contact me with any feedback as I’d love to improve.
